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Neural Networks Upscale Film from 1896 to 4K, Make It Look Like It Was Shot on a Modern Smartphone:
When watching old film footage that's plagued with excessive amounts of grain, gate weave, soft focus, and a complete lack of color, it's hard to feel connected to the people in the clip, or what's going on. It looks like a movie, and over the years that medium has taught our brains that what they're seeing on screen might not actually be real. By comparison, the experience of watching videos of friends and family captured on your smartphone is completely different thanks to 4K resolutions and high frame-rates. Those clips feel more authentic and while watching them there's more of a connection to the moment, even if you weren't actually there while it was being shot.
[...] L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat doesn't have the same effect on modern audiences, but Denis Shiryaev wondered if it could be made more compelling by using neural network powered algorithms (including Topaz Labs' Gigapixel AI and DAIN) to not only upscale the footage to 4K, but also increase the frame rate to 60 frames per second. You might yell at your parents for using the motion smoothing setting on their fancy new TV, but here the increased frame rate has a dramatic effect on drawing you into the action.
[...] The results are far from perfect; we're hoping Shiryaev applies one of the many deep learning algorithms that can colorize black and white photos to this film as well, but the obvious potential of these tools to enhance historical footage to increase its impact is just as exciting as the potential for it to be misused.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by zocalo on Wednesday February 05 2020, @02:58PM (2 children)
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday February 05 2020, @05:45PM (1 child)
Oh no, I don't think so. Instead, the AI will easily perceive that religion is a human construct, made to suit our needs and tastes. We tend to be too close to it all to have a truly objective view. Though religion seems very irrational, it actually has an appeal to rationality. If some natural force is actually controlled by a god, a being of considerable intelligence and supernatural ability to communicate with humans, then perhaps that god can be reasoned with or appeased or something. For millennia, people have been trying to talk to natural disasters, begging them not to strike or to go elsewhere, offering various sacrifices and such like. "Rain, rain go away. Come again some other day."
There's no particular reason for the universe to be monotheist, polytheist, or atheist. So why did most people choose polytheism, and then gradually shift to monotheism? That's the way they want the universe to be. Then they put in lots of effort trying to make the facts fit with their decisions.
Sometimes religion has helped. I have read that we are actually by nature mildly promiscuous. So why do so many practice monogamy? I often imagine that the whole monogamy thing was to keep the young men from killing over the young women, which would weaken the tribe's ability to defend itself from outside attack. Another huge plus is reducing disease transmission. Nice too that it also resulted in some basic fairness, and more genetic diversity than if only the biggest and strongest man fathers all the children while the rest of the men are denied.
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Wednesday February 05 2020, @07:11PM
The question though would be whether a neural net would be able to grasp things at that level of abstraction and comprehend the underlying messages. Given we don't *really* understand how deep learning networks actually work - e.g. we often can't reliably predict how they are going to respond to a given set of previously unseen inputs - I think we'd struggle to actually train it to do something useful in terms of gaining additional insights into meaningful teachings that we don't already know but, regardless of what happens on that front, I do think the results might be interesting from the perspective of the construction and teaching of deep learning systems.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!